In her bones: second wave “women’s time” in Tanith Lee’s The Winter Players

Abstract:

During feminism’s second wave (circa 1960‒1980) a particular approach to time gained
ground and was explored by many cultural feminist activists, thinkers and writers. This
feminine time was conceived of as cyclical and organic rather than masculine, mechanistic
and linear and developed out of the essentialist celebration of “Woman” that dominated
cultural feminism during this period. These cultural feminists called for an embracing
of “women’s time” which, they argued, would liberate women whose identities had been
limited by the expectations of a patriarchal Western world and the patrilinear temporality
it prescribed. Although their terms are considered problematically essentialist today, this
remains an interesting moment in both feminist history and debates regarding temporality.
This paper discusses fantasy author and feminist, Tanith Lee’s evocation and exploration of
second wave cultural feminism’s “women’s time” in her 1976 novella The Winter Players.
In this novella Lee’s protagonist is doomed to repeat a static, limited role for all time and in
order to break free, steps into an alternative cyclical women’s time that undoes the authority
of the paternalistic his-story that traps her. Once in this temporal space, she draws on both
her own magical power and that of a female continuum of priestesses to reweave patrilinear time, in so doing empowering the women of her world to claim their right to public space/
time.

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